A Wanderer in Holland eBook

But we must pause for a little while at Sorgh Vliet
(which has the same meaning as Sans Souci),
where two hundred years ago lived in genial retirement
the writer who best represents the shrewd sagacity
of the Dutch character—­Jacob Cats, or Vader
Cats as he was affectionately called, the author of
the Dutch “Household Bible,” a huge miscellaneous
collection of wise saws and modern instances, humour
and satire, upon all the businesses of life.

Mr. Austin Dobson, who leaves grains of gold on all
he touches, has described in his Side-Walk Studies
the huge, illustrated edition of Cats’ Works
(Amsterdam, 1655) which is held sacred in all rightly
constituted old-fashioned Dutch households. I
have seen it at the British Museum, and it seems to
me to be one of the best picture-books in the world.

As Mr. Dobson says, the life of old Holland is reproduced
in it. “What would one not give for such
an illustrated copy of Shakespeare! In these
pages of Jacob Cats we have the authentic Holland of
the seventeenth century:—­its vanes and
spires and steep-roofed houses; its gardens with their
geometric tulip-beds, their formally-clipped alleys
and arches, their shining parallelograms of water.
Here are its old-fashioned interiors, with the deep
fire-places and queer andirons, the huge four-posters,
the prim portraits on the wall, the great brass-clamped
coffers and carved armories for the ruffs and
starched collars and stiff farthingales of the women.
In one picture you may see the careful housewife mournfully
inspecting a moth-eaten garment which she has just
taken from a chest that Wardour Street might envy;
in another she is energetically cuffing the ’foolish
fat scullion,’ who has let the spotted Dalmatian
coach-dog overturn the cauldron at the fire.
Here an old crone, with her spectacles on, is cautiously
probing the contents of the said cauldron with a fork;
here the mistress of the house is peeling pears; here
the plump and soft-hearted cheese-wife is entertaining
an admirer—­outside there are pictures as
vivid. Here are the clumsy leather-topped coach
with its masked occupant and stumbling horses; the
towed trekschuit, with its merry freight, sliding
swiftly through the low-lying landscape; the windy
mole, stretching seaward, with its blown and flaring
beacon-fire. Here again in the street is the toy-shop
with its open front and store of mimic drums and halberds
for the martial little burghers; here are the fruiteress
with her stall of grapes and melons, the rat-catcher
with his string of trophies, the fowler and his clap-net,
the furrier with his stock of skins.”

In 1860 a number of Van der Venne’s best pictures
were redrawn by John Leighton to accompany translations
of the fables by Richard Pigot. As a taste of
Cats’ quality I quote two of the pieces.
Why the pictures should have been redrawn when they
might have been reproduced exactly is beyond my understanding.
This is one poem:—­